How to serve from different locations in Nginx?

Question

I want to have different sub-websites inside my website, in such a way that each of them matches to a different location.

For example, <website>/game/ should serve stuff from /var/www/<gamePath>, and <website>/<blog> should serve stuff from /var/www/<blogPath>. As a default, <website>/<anything> should serve stuff form /var/www/html/.

My current config looks like this:

server {
 server_name <website>;
 root /var/www/html;

 location / {
   try_files $uri /index.html =404;
 }

 location /game/ {
   root /var/www/<gamePath>/;
   try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html =404;
  }
 
 location /blog/ {
   root /var/www/<blogPath>/;
   try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html =404;
  }
  <ssl stuff>
}

While the default location works, and <website> correctly serves the file /var/www/html/index.html, when I try to do <website>/blog/favicon.ico, it does not serve the favicon, but instead defaults to /var/www/<blogPath>/index.html. It seems that this is because it is appending blog (the location) to the uri, and does it won't match anything.

I have seen many questions around this issue, but no answer has worked for me so far. Some replace the root inside each specific location by alias, but if I do that I only get 404's. Other solutions try rewriting the request instead of using $uri, in order to avoid the location being appended. This seems like the way to go, but I haven't found a regex that actually works (maybe they require trivial modifications that I haven't been able to do myself, as all I've tried is to copy and paste them).

Answer 1

nginx root directive works by adding the URI part from the location to the end of file path it tries to serve to the user.

So, in your example, loading /game/example URL makes nginx look up the file /var/www/<gamePath>/game/example.

To make /game/example load /var/www/<gamePath>/example, you need to use following configuration.

location ~ ^/game/(?<filepath>.*)$ {
    root /var/www/<gamePath>/;
    try_files /$filepath /$filepath/ /index.html =404;
}

This tells nginx to capture the string after /game to $filepath variable, which is then used to locate the file.

Another alternative is to use alias instead of root.